


We Are Family

by Anonymous



Category: The Martian (2015), The Martian - All Media Types
Genre: Background Ares3some, Dancing, Disco, Found Family, Gen, Music, Potato-Related Illness, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:53:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8882350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “In my defense, though, I think anyone who was trapped with anything—even if they liked it—for that many sols would find its enjoyment levels seriously compromised.”“But didn’t you start out hating it already?” Vogel asked. It was always the quiet ones you had to watch out for: they’d be first to shiv you in line in the mess hall.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moonlight69](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlight69/gifts).



“Assume the position,” Chris Beck said, waving a hand at the exam table that Mark Watney had begun to think of as his bunk, because god knew he certainly spent all his time here. “Mark Watney post-intercept exam, day forty-one,” Chris added for the computer log. Beth Johanssen was quietly tapping away on her keyboard—it was so adorable of her to always sit there typing these up instead of letting Chris rely on audio logs, as if she was Beck’s assistant and Mark didn’t know that she was playing comfort service animal for him. All of them were doing shit like that, he was totally on to them—they’d rearranged quarters or adapted schedules or created group situations solely as a means to stay by Mark’s side, continually finding some creative excuse or another to keep him company, 24/7. 

He dutifully lay down; Mark was the _best patient_ , the reigning champeen—who wouldn’t want to be when they had Dr. Hotass McHotshot touching them and fussing over them and giving them all the good drugs? “Do you know what today is?” Chris asked, scanning Mark’s midsection with the imager and gently palpating his ribs; the engineer in Mark loved all Chris’s _Star Trek_ medical gizmos. Man, there were so many fucking awesome things about being back with his crew, but one of the top best, A++, would whip through space with a hole in his suit again best? The soft clucking and tsking and hmpfing of one Dr. Chris Beck as he examined you, gazing at you euphorically with those dreamy baby blues and constantly reminding you that he was wildly happy you were alive and safe and here on his exam table. Those charming little sounds were a goddamn Brahms symphony and Mark had never been a romantic except as to how he was now.

“The best day ever? Remember, every day without potatoes and disco is the best day.” It didn’t do to get too mushy. Frankly, even the worst shit up here was still better than the best day alone on Mars, and there’d been some mild to pretty fucking bad shit since intercept with the Hermes. One of these days, Mark would have to do a complete inventory, but so far the highlights were: had lost a few teeth—he wasn’t at the level of hillbilly moonshiner or anything, but Chris had warned him he’d probably lose a few more and would need reconstructive work done—blacked out a couple times because Earth-level gravity was an ego-crushing bitch; needed assistance with showers in a really humiliatingly intimate way; endured a few public barfing episodes because he got carried away with food—holy fuck was chocolate almost worth the agony of his ribs, though—and there’d been a dicey few days where Chris wasn’t sure Mark wasn’t in the early stages of something fatal called Keshan disease because “it would have been so much better if they’d sent us out with sweet potatoes and now you have an alarming selenium deficiency” and he was concerned about congestive heart failure. 

“You always say that. It _is_ the best day, but that’s not the really good news.” He looked through that scope thing into Mark’s ears, up his nose, down his throat as Mark “aaahhed” on cue. A couple years ago, this endless poking would have driven Mark mad—initially check-ups were three times a day, then two, then slowly trickled off to one—not to mention having Chris always hovering nearby, keeping one eye on Mark like it wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world: Chris seriously thought he was stealthy. Now it was complete fucking bliss. “Today is graduation day: you are officially at what I would classify as out of danger day. We can decrease full exams to twice a week, and probably once a week pretty soon after that.” Beth beamed at him as she tapped away.

Instead of relief, Mark felt a weird and unexpected little twinge of disappointment; this was, oddly, the freakin’ highlight of his day, just lying back, Chris’s hands on him, Beth every once in a while reaching over to squeeze his leg or run her fingers over the top of his foot. Sooner or later the three of them would be having an earnest discussion about where this relationship was headed, but what it was now—the two of them cocooned around him at night in Beth’s bunk, pouring their love and joy at his return over him like a glitter-rainbow waterfall—suited Mark just fine, and he wasn’t necessarily ready for anything more than this, anyway. They’d also want to visit the more important issue: _Leather Goddesses of Phobos_ , because WTF. “That’s great,” Mark said, but that meant the really tough business of getting back to normal would start.

****

“Does that mean we don’t have to be nice to him anymore?” Rick Martinez asked, and Mark flipped his spoon at him with his right hand, because the left one was currently covered by one of Rick’s square little mitts. 

Commander Lewis leaned back in her chair, spooned out the last of her chicken soup, and said, “I don’t remember that ever being a command directive.”

What _had_ been a command directive, however, was making up for Mark’s year and a half of isolation by being handsy and petting him and otherwise maintaining constant physical contact. At least, he was pretty sure that it was a directive, even though he had no proof.

He’d always been a pretty handsy guy himself, never really down with that old-fashioned toxic-masculinity I-am-an-island thing (at least, pre-Robinson Crusoe on Mars), but now Mark wanted to fucking crawl inside their skins with them, shove his face into the fabulous-smelling hollow where their shoulders met their necks, run his fingers through their hair over and over till they might go bald—well, except for Alex Vogel, obviously, since he was already there. Mark had to fight to stop himself from smooching everyone hello or goodbye and hugging them for an uncomfortably long time—not just Chris and Beth, but all of them, he was consumed by the need for contact with them. And the thing was, they let him! They freaking _encouraged_ him. It was _awesome_.

If it wasn’t the aforementioned sleeping-quarters-sharing with Beth and Chris, it was someone clasping his arm as they floated through the zero G parts of the Hermes, or sitting snugged up behind him handing him tools so he could fix Rick’s bunk, or attached to his side while he worked with his plants. It was just so damn...touchy-feely, and if Mark had to turn away from time to time in a probably pointless effort to hide the tears that quivered in his eyes, well, that was nobody’s business but his.

Once they’d relaxed more about really most sincerely having him back on board, they’d fallen into the familiar routine of flipping him endless quantities of epic shit. During one exam, Chris had gotten in a nice little dig about Mark’s first words when he’d come face to face with the commander being “an insult about her taste,” leaving Mark a little bewildered.

“But that’s who I am,” Mark had said, rather weakly, “I flip people shit. I make jokes.”

“Sure, of course. We all do. And the commander can get as well as she gives. Still. Dick move, all things considered.”

“I thought it was charmingly insouciant in a moment of extreme tension, lightening the mood in the face of me almost dying. I had been trying to come up with a super pithy bon mot but the whole _Iron Man, you guys waving at me as I sailed off into the great beyond forever and ever_ thing kind of derailed my thoughts.”

Chris had rolled his eyes and patted his head. “You keep telling yourself that.”

“I wasn’t _really_ insulting her music. It was that or start sobbing and embarrass both of us, and fog up my helmet.” He’d considered it for a minute. “Did you guys really think I was mean?”

“I didn’t say _mean_. Just, you know, it was the first thing you said when you were face to face, and everyone’s got their own taste in music, is all. Lewis has hers. My choice might have been to give her shit about blowing up part of her own ship.”

For a while he’d stayed quiet as Chris fussed and cooed over him and petted his hair. This was the goddamn _life_. “But you know—” he’d started.

“Mark—it’s okay, I swear. No one’s pissed or anything. As your doctor, I advise you to stop worrying about it, you’ve got enough goddamn things to worry about, and as your friend, I can assure you we’re just so happy to have you back no one cares what you said.” 

“—I think being forced to listen to _any_ one thing for a year and a half is a kind of torture. I mean, shit, even if I’d had a drive’s worth of classic rock or Springsteen’s entire catalog, I’d have probably started to think of it as crap pretty soon, too.”

That had only earned Mark a cryptic smile at the time—which was exactly what everyone was wearing right now as they watched him around the table. Okay, so maybe he should nut up and apologize.

“So, um, Commander—it’s been pointed out to me that I miiiight have been a little bit insulting about your music preferences when we were going for the team gold in ribbon gymnastics, outer space division.” When he glanced at Chris and Beth, they were looking at him with exasperated fondness. It was a familiar look to Mark. “And that perhaps I should apologize for making a dick move, I believe the medical term was.”

While Lewis didn’t laugh, she didn’t exactly act as if it bothered her, either.

“In my defense, though, and as I pointed out to our good doctor, I think anyone who was trapped with anything—even if they liked it—for that many sols would find its enjoyment levels seriously compromised.”

“But didn’t you start out hating it already?” Vogel asked. It was always the quiet ones you had to watch out for: they’d be first to shiv you in line in the mess hall. 

“Come on, it was a widely accepted belief since before I was even born: disco sucks!” This time they all threw their spoons at him. “What?”

“Dude, you’re better than that tired old straight white guy homophobic crap,” Rick said. 

Mark gave his best O.o face. “What’s homophobic and—wait, are you also calling me a racist? I think you’re calling me a racist, and maybe a misogynist in there, too.”

Clearly there was a joke here that Mark hadn’t been let in on, because they were all grinning. Lewis tossed her hair back over her shoulders in an indication that they were about to be schooled. “That whole ‘disco sucks’ backlash started almost as soon as it went mainstream. There was even this big party made up by a deejay who left his job when his rock radio station went pop and disco—he convinced the people at Comiskey Park to let him and the audience blow up disco records as a protest or something. There was an actual riot afterwards. The hate spread because a lot of straight white guys like him didn’t like the people who enjoyed disco or its roots.”

That was—unpleasant. “Aw, say it ain’t so...Comiskey, really?”

“Chicago _represent_.” Chris gave him a wink. Seriously? Whose side was he supposed to be on.

“Hey, not my team! And it was gone before I was born, anyway.”

“Way to miss the point, bonehead.” Rick squeezed his knuckles really tight and Mark yelped—he was still such a fragile little flower, even six weeks in. “Think about where that sound came from, though—funk and R&B and salsa, you know, my people. Not especially white. And a lot of the performers were women, with a big gay audience.”

“Okay, does everybody know about this but me?” It was possible, maaaybe, that he was getting a little defensive.

“I didn’t till just now,” Beth offered brightly, tapping on her keyboard and nudging Mark’s shoulder with her own. He was glad she was sitting on his other side, because she was so cute and harmless that he could use her like a human shield in case things got ugly. “But I’m looking it up right now and...yeah. Wow. It says here disco came out of the previously underground gay club culture at a time when gay people were becoming more visible, the whole landscape was changing. People wanted to get up and dance and move and have a good time when everything around them was shit.” She pointed at the screen apologetically and turned the laptop toward him. “According to this.”

Mark supposed that made sense; he’d known about all that stuff, Stonewall and the gay rights movement and all that, but he’d never thought of it as tied together with disco. “But I mean, Commander, why disco? Why _Dukes of Hazard_ and _Happy Days_? Why the ’70s, of all things?”

“I grew up with it.” Lewis shrugged. “That was my mom’s time—her proms and homecomings, her first kisses and make-outs at the drive-in. Her first passions. She loved it all—she and Dad always played the records and told me about the concerts, the clubs...” Her face became soft but serious and she leaned into the table. “I had a great relationship with my parents, I wasn’t like most kids, rejecting all the things their parents loved. It wasn’t perfect all the time, you know, but I truly loved the things they did. And the whole history of it, the social changes that were occurring while they were growing up...I live for that crap. Not everything from the ’70s is disco, you know, and not all the TV is cheesy.” Her nose wrinkled when she said it—a habit of hers that always made him laugh, how she could be such a badass and such a cute dork at the same time. 

“That’s actually documented science,” Chris said. “There’ve been studies that show the music we loved when we were teenagers is something we feel much more attached to, we love more passionately, than the stuff we like as adults.”

It was hilarious the way each of their faces went slack at the same time and they all started talking over each other: “Oh yeah, Beyoncé and Rihanna—Taylor Swift!” “...Jay-Z, Bruno Mars for me” or “fucking Pink and the Black-Eyed Peas, I swear” and “I was an indie man, myself.” Alex shook his head. “None of you have heard of my teenage music, _thank god_.” 

Chris grinned at them and continued, “We’re in the process of forming our sense of self at that time, parts of our brains are still developing, hormones going crazy, all of that. We feel more intensely about things then than we probably ever will again in our lives, so music becomes kind of a...I don’t know, soundtrack of us at that period, and what we enjoy forms a stronger, deeper connection with us than at any other point we’ll have.”

Not that Mark didn’t have faith in Beck’s very large brain, but— Chris rolled his eyes and shook his head at Mark. “I’m a medical doctor, nimrod, we do a psych rotation. And if you want to be a flight surgeon on deep space missions, you spend a lot of time with psych journals once you join NASA.” He was such a freakish overachiever. “I read stuff.”

Of course Alex would ask the most pointed question: “What’s the inverse of your question to the commander—what have you got against disco, if it’s not only being a grumpy white guy?”

Et tu, Vogel?

Beth leaned into him harder, giving him those awful hateful doe eyes and that terrible soft indulgent smile. Ugh.

“I don’t know, I guess...it’s the inane lyrics and the constant, samey-samey four-four beat.” Lewis was pursing her lips. “Yeah, okay, that sounds pretty weak—I imagine if someone didn’t like what I enjoy listening to, they’d probably think it all sounded like so much annoying noise. I know my folks sure did. _Turn that shit down. Listen to some real music for a change._ ”

Man, Alex was on a roll, because he asked with a wicked grin, “So, we know what you hate, but you never say what you do like.”

Before he could answer, the rest of them burst out laughing, and Lewis reached over to squeeze his arm. “I don’t care if you think I have terrible taste. I’m just glad you’re here to argue about it or insult me or whatever floats your boat. It’s all good. You’re alive and you’re _here_.”

“Because you like me, you really, really like me.” You could pick a worse crew to be stuck in space with for two years, was what Mark was saying, even if they were a little gleeful about pointing out his inadequacies as a human being.

“We really, really don’t,” Rick said with a shit-eating grin.

“Says the guy who’s holding my hand right now.”

 

****

“Oh, hey, Mom—before you go,” Mark said, just as she was reaching to shut off the connection. “Do you remember disco? And people saying disco sucked? Some guy blew up records in Comiskey Park because he was butthurt that everyone loved disco or something.”

She seemed baffled by his question, but any excuse to talk to him for longer would make her happy, Mark figured, and if he couldn’t embarrass himself in front of his mom, then who could he with? Both his parents had finally reached a point, this many days into his recovery, where they didn’t spontaneously burst into tears as soon as they saw him on the screen. He wasn’t entirely sure they didn’t do it the instant they logged off, though—not that Mark did that himself, either. Absolutely not. “Um...well, I was pretty young, so I didn’t pay as much attention to stuff like that as your aunt did. I loved the music, but I loved most things at that age, anything on Top 40 radio. That was what they played at school dances. I do remember that garbage about disco sucking, sure, and I definitely remember people looking down their noses at it. You know, it wasn’t ‘real rock’ or whatever. I didn’t have a lot of patience for butthurt guys.” Her mean little grin made him laugh.

“Huh.” Mark sipped at his grape juice, savoring her smile, and she chuckled at whatever face he must have been making.

“I dated a guy once who used to pull that white guy rock crap with me all the time—insulting anything that was popular with girls, or African-American people, or whatever. I remember sitting in the car on the way to dinner listening to him go on and on about some band I liked not being real music and listing all their deficiencies. I knew that was the last date we’d ever have because he was such an insufferable twat.” Way to go, past Mom.

She added, “But in the ’80s or ’90s, everything we danced to was basically just the same as disco—moved into the mainstream, you know. And by the time you went to your first dances, it was disco with the serial numbers filed off. Everything changes, evolves.” After a pause, she asked, “Mark, did you insult someone’s taste in music?”

“What? No. Just something I heard when we were talking about Commander Lewis’s playlists. She’s a big disco fan.”

Rolling her eyes, she said, “Uh huh.”

It was certainly a little depressing to think that he’d been mindlessly parroting a lot of bullshit all these years, never giving it a chance, but he also kinda felt like that ship had sailed. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll talk to you again soon.” He was gonna have to do some research before he formulated an official apology, and would probably have to eat some crow in front of Commander Lewis, maybe even all of NASA. Well, that was fine—at least it wasn’t fucking _potatoes_.

 

****

 

Next level unlocked: he’d increased the treadmill setting to what might technically qualify as “brisk pace.” Though Mama Beck would no doubt be tsking at him once he got to the gym and making a point by dramatically turning the treadmill down, so Mark hurriedly started walking before Chris could kill his buzz. 

He hadn’t really had a chance to see how far he could push himself, though, before Beth joined him, rubbing his arm. “Hey, come on up to the rec with me.”

At his skeptical glance—that was the face of someone preparing to troll you—she said, “It’s a surprise. C’mon.”

“Is this about the plan for you to eat everyone if there was no other option for survival? Have they changed the designated cannibal part to me because I’m the skinniest?”

“Shut up and come on.” She clutched his arm as they drifted toward the rec area, big doofy grin on her face—she really should stop pretending to be sweet, she was just so not good at it. No one believed it.

“Whaaat is this?” Mark asked when he saw the whole crew and their stupid smirky faces.

“I was thinking about our conversation the other day,” Lewis said, pulling her hair back. “And remembering that old quote: talking about music is like dancing about architecture. You were right—you got this awful, concentrated dose of something, for over a year and a half, that you had no reason to like in the first place. But it’s different when you have options, you know? It’s different when you have family to enjoy it with.” She pointed a finger gun at Beth. “Hit it.”

The lights dimmed and hundreds of glittering, shimmering dots circled the room—Beth had somehow rigged up the computer to simulate a frigging disco ball. “I put together a shortish playlist, at the top end of what Beck says you can handle, and I’ll teach you some dances, but if you get fatigued, you tap out, okay?”

“Oh my god,” Mark said, turning around and around to follow the lights. “This is...this is fucking great.” And he found he really did mean that, the thought of listening to another one of her playlists wasn’t horrible at all. Lewis grabbed his hand and spun him toward her—he’d forgotten how deceptively strong she was, but if she tried to dip him he was going to put up a vaguely manly fight. Beth was up and right beside him, and next thing Mark knew they were all clustered nicely and there was Michael Jackson on the speakers singing “Rock With Me.” 

“That one wasn’t on your drive,” Mark said, laughing as Rick grabbed his hips from behind and rolled them side-to-side. “I actually liked that one!”

“Not everything ended up on the drive I brought to the surface. I tried to pick some songs that you wouldn’t have had to listen to ad nauseam, and I had NASA send some deep cuts you don’t hear every day.”

“Sorry we don’t have any gold lamé or cocaine on board.” Chris gave him shrug, or at least Mark thought it was a shrug, could have just been his idea of dancing. “I offered to dig something up from the med bay, but...” 

“I’ve always wanted to say this: shut up and dance,” Mark said. And they did. The commander kept up a running history for him—where a song came in the timeline of disco history, what the influences were, what kind of influence it might have had, facts about artists, and she was clearly having a ball, like her life’s dream hadn’t been leading a mission to Mars but rather acting as a docent at a disco museum. 

Mark was happily exhausted and sweating halfway through the playlist, but it was a good tradeoff, because now he knew the steps to the Hustle, the Bump, the Bus Stop, and the Electric Slide, not that he could actually do them with any amount of skill. Turned out Beth and Rick were the pros (“I wooed my wife with salsa, you know,” Rick said with pride), who danced rings around the rest of them—even Melissa Lewis. And while Mark used to have some pretty decent moves himself when he was young, now he was perfectly happy to stand and wave his arms, the sun his little disco-loving planets orbited around.

When he sat down for a break, Mark thought: some of this shit isn’t really that bad. Something about listening to it with the kind of people who’d commit mutiny for you, well, all of a sudden you saw the mirrorballed light. Once the happy ache in his ribs faded a bit, Lewis grabbed him and pulled him up again. “They’re playing our song,” she said and they all puppy-piled him. Mark had heard this song approximately two-fuckthousand times on Mars, he’d hoped never to hear it again—but now “We Are Family” rocketed to the top of his list of favorite songs as they danced in a big happy blob together. 

Yeah. Mark fucking loved disco, 10/10, excellent music. If anyone wanted to tell him disco sucked, they could fucking fight him—and he’d survived an entire planet trying repeatedly to kill him, so good luck with that.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to my betas, Rachael Sabotini and Minim Calibre. Special thanks to Dorinda for the plot bunny.


End file.
